Henry Cobb and Yvonne Szeto: Architects of Fordham Law School

Video by Brian Russell, Produced by Tom Stoelker. Publicity included placement in The New York Times. 

More than 50 years ago, after urban renewal cleared two superblocks near Lincoln Center to build Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, Fordham became the only institution outside of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts permitted to use the title “Lincoln Center” in its name—an honor bestowed by the performing arts institution’s board.

Today, a new 22-story law school and undergraduate residence hall, designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, is visually vitalizing the association that until now existed in name only.

The new law school sings as part of an ensemble, complementing, but not mimicking the travertine stone palette of the Metropolitan Opera. Or, as a recent article in The New York Times described it: “Clad in precast concrete panels, metal, and glass, the building features a series of undulating arcs intended to make an engaging gesture toward Lincoln Center while providing a distinctive identity for the law school.”

Henry Cobb collaborated on the design of the 468,000-square-foot building with design partner Yvonne Szeto. For Mr. Cobb, at 88 years of age, the completion of this project is a capstone for a year that has included receiving the gold medal in architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It is the largest academic building of his 65-year career.

“From the first visit that Yvonne and I made to the site, we were aware it was a very privileged location because we were creating a new face for Fordham toward Lincoln Center,” said Cobb.

The new building engages its surroundings on several levels. At street level, visitors can peer into a moot courtroom through a wall of windows. A student café enlivens the sidewalk. Just above, the building is set back, making space for a generous veranda. The floors of the law school continue up another eight stories behind a sinewy checkerboard façade of precast concrete panels and glass. Above are undergraduate student residences in a tower that reaches 22 stories, distinguished from the law school by a convex glass curtain wall which thrusts out toward the arts complex. To the south the tower maximizes sky exposure to the Moses Plaza by angling away from the park, while the law school’s lower register gently cups the green space to complete its cloister-like atmosphere. A grand stairway on 62nd Street invites the public in. At the top, the building aligns itself with the city’s grid by gesturing in an exact perpendicular to Broadway.

“It’s an acknowledgement of the intersecting grid of the city,” said Cobb. “I think it’s kind of wonderful that we were able find a way of acknowledging Broadway’s diagonal in this building and yet it’s up in the sky. It would have been inappropriate at street level, but up in the sky it’s powerful.”

Perhaps most unique to a congested city like New York, are the uninterrupted views of the building—something afforded by only a handful of sites in Manhattan.

“From the Lincoln Center plaza you can actually walk towards this building and see it in full view alongside the arches of the Met,” said Szeto.

The undulating curves of the building’s exterior work their way into motifs in the terrazzo floors, stainless steel elevators, and leaflike acoustic panels that drop down from the ceiling. Circular stairs join three sets of bi-level floors that include classrooms, the Maloney Library, and administrative and faculty offices. Atop it all, on the ninth floor, the Geraldine Ferraro Clinical Education Center houses a program that serves clients and trains students.

Throughout, lounges and movable seating encourage impromptu collaboration.

While architecture is an inherently collaborative profession, it’s usually the man at the top who gets all the credit—and it is usually a man. In this case, Cobb said he was very much “aware of how Yvonne’s sensibility has changed my way of thinking over the years.

“I don’t want to get specific, but it has to do with certain ways of thinking about form that are natural to her and not natural to me, which I appreciate.”

Szeto downplays the role of gender in the school’s design.

“I think our responses come from the site, and the specifics of the program of the client. So I don’t think its necessarily ever masculine or feminine. It’s just a natural synthesis of an outcome.”

“Here at Fordham, it’s all about the architecture reflecting the pedagogy of the place and reflecting the way they want to teach law.”

Design Nods to Old and New

The Wall Street Journal

Almost a decade after the city established the Gansevoort Market Historic District, the neighborhood has drastically changed nonetheless. Metal awnings still hang off several historic buildings and a few meat hooks still swingalong Washington Street.

But the area now ebbs and flows with Town Cars, the High Line draws huge tourist crowds, and the much celebrated Standard Hotel, which opened in 2008, sits just a few feet from the district border at Washington Street.

Into this hodgepodge of old and new will soon step a six-story office and retail building designed by Morris Adjmi, which was approved by the Landmark Preservation Commission last month. Landmarks took such pains to preserve the non-descript meatpacking warehouse at 837 Washington Street that Mr. Adjmi’s twisted torso building literally will rise out of its façade.

On completion, the building will stand as a case study of how a design makes it through Landmarks while respecting neighborhood context and maintaining a semblance of the architect’s original intent. But it will also illustrate the limitations of a landmark district.  

Mr. Adjmi’s design is vaguely reminiscent of the infamous 1968 proposal to alter Grand Central Terminal with a 55-story tower by Marcel Breuer. The ultimately successful effort to block that plan--which would have preserved the face of the historic terminal but not the interior--went to the U.S. Supreme Court and formed the basis of modern landmark law. 

 But a meatpacking warehouse is far cry from Grand Central, a point not lost on neighborhood denizens. Sitting on a bench in front of an establishment called Hogs and Heifers a texting Chad Garber was asked what he thought of the dilapidated building.  “I don’t know anything about it, except that it’s across the street from the Standard,” he said.

Adam Kost, a veteran of late nights at Hogs, was perplexed about the effort to save 837 Washington. “It’s really unattractive compared to what’s going on down here. I don’t get the point,” he said. When shown the rendering of Mr. Adjmi’s design, Mr. Kost remained unmoved. “It’s always tough to polish a sneaker.”

 But what might look beige brick bunker in any other neighborhood represents the last phase of building when the area was still a functioning meatpacking district. Mr. Adjmi’s design nods to that manufacturing past not just by preserving the grit of the old façade, but also through the use of the exposed I-beam as the primary means of expression.

 The vertical beams twist from within the old building, each successive floor pivoting on an angle that seems provoked by the High Line, as if a motion blur on a passing train. As it rises in height the structure twists away farther away from the original and from the past. The tension turns the building into a metaphor, rather than a mere addition.

“I don’t think that every two story building in New York should be doing this,” said Mr. Adjmi. “Every case really needs to be looked at individually. This building certainly has formal merit as well historical fabric that made us look toward using it as a base.”

But the commission could have gone even further. Mr. Adjmi’s first two attempts at Landmarks were turned down due to height, never mind that the slender Standard, designed by Ennead Architects, hovers above the site. The push and pull with Landmarks saw Mr. Adjmi’s design go from 113 feet to 88 feet, sacrificing much of the design’s kinetic quality. 

Landmarks has been known to let pass some pretty wild buildings. Here, the commission could’ve acknowledged the tall new neighbor in The Standard and adapted a touch more to a very changed neighborhood.

Thin Crust

Architect's Newspaper

The pubic review process got off to a cantankerous start on January 3 after New York University (NYU) filed plans with City Planning for its 20-year expansion on two superblocks in Greenwich Village. In a move that struck some Villagers as audacious, the university touted the addition of more than 140,000 square feet of publicly accessible open space, while building out 2.4 million square feet in new construction. Nearly one million square feet will sit below grade, making the new public space on the northernmost block akin to an elaborate rooftop garden. This prompted consternation among residents who fear that future university administrations will renege on the public space arrangement. 

Currently, the two twin slab buildings of Washington Square Village sit on the northern superblock with an elevated courtyard designed by Hideo Sasaki. The university has proposed eliminating the Sasaki Garden and replacing it with two new buildings designed by Grimshaw with Toshiko Mori. The substructure for these two buildings, known as the Boomerang Buildings, would run the entire width of the superblock from La Guardia Place to Mercer Street and would be capped with a garden designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. The substructure alone is nearly 770,000 square feet.

In tallying the promised 135,000 square feet of open space, NYU combined about 90,000 square feet of privately owned public space (POPS) with nearly 40,000 square feet of newly designated parkland on what are commonly called the “DOT strips,” which run beside Mercer and La Guardia. The parcels were assembled by the Department of Transportation in the 1950s as part of Robert Moses’ failed attempt to build a downtown highway. The new substructure would sit beneath the strips as well as the POPS. In order to assuage further development fears, the university included language in its ULURP application to designate the strips as parkland under the control of the Parks Department, which they say would be very difficult to ever reverse. But opponents said that the land is already owned by the city, and there’s no good reason to cede, sell, or redesignate.

Because the substructure sits beneath the strips, the university has also sought easements for future maintenance. It’s this issue in particular that has inflamed neighborhood activists. “Yes, Michael Van Valkenburgh can design the best landscape plan going, but that doesn’t guarantee it won’t be ripped up in the future,” said Martin Tessler of the Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031 (CAAN). “Their institutional memory is nonexistent, because events change, circumstances change, and administrators change.” CAAN’s Terri Cude added that since the strips sit at entrances to the Boomerang Buildings, the newly designated parkland is essentially an entry plaza to private buildings to be maintained by the public.

In a telephone interview, NYU’s vice president of government affairs and civic engagement, Alicia Hurley, said that such details haven’t been ironed out yet and added that by designating the area as parkland, NYU has committed itself to additional public review. “We initially designed the space with Michael Van Valkenburgh with the intention of purchasing the strips,” she said. “But once we shifted and agreed to map these areas as parkland, then we’ll have to go though a whole new effort to test our design with the community and the Design Commission.”

Magic City

Architect's Newspaper

With casinos and convention centers becoming the catchall answer to urban-planning problems up and down the East Coast, the new Revel in Atlantic City may prove an influential model. It merges several markets under one roof in a smoke-free environment (a novelty in casino land) including hotel resort, casino, theaters, and convention space.

The $2.4 billion project designed by Arquitectonica was supported in part by $261 million in New Jersey taxpayer incentives and is a cornerstone of Governor Chris Christie’s attempt to turn Atlantic City around. But there are signs that the complex is not playing nice with its urban context. Developers of the Revel said in an interview that they weren’t even aware of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority master plan designed by Jerde Partnership and announced in March.

On a recent visit, initial views of the Revel from Pacific Avenue reveal only a massive parking garage—the podium to a future 47-story slab—offering no hint of Arquitectonica’s impressive wave-like curtain wall on the boardwalk. Revel CEO Kevin DeSanctis explained bluntly, “You need to have a back of the house somewhere,” adding that scenic views of the ocean and an inlet to the north needed to be maintained. “You sort of run out of sides pretty quick,” he said.

Left to right: dozens of ceiling treatments define the space; the woozy hall on the way to the high-design restrooms; the Velvet Room features a larger-than-life lamp.
 
And the priority was to give the casino floor not only plenty of natural light but also ocean views. In a shocking departure from casino protocol, players can look up from the roulette wheel and see the Atlantic Ocean. The Philly-based architect of record, BLT Architects, oversaw miles of interior space, assigning more than 65 interior design firms to provide a dizzying array of finishes, from polished chrome columns to a 100-foot gold-flecked mobile. BLT principal Michael Prifti called the sequence of glitzy rooms, “a series of wows.”

This lounge designed by Floss Barber is is one of many throughout the Resort.
 
But it’s the melding of convention and performance event spaces with casino and resort amenities that might well capture the imagination of other governors and mayors seeking that longed-for casino/ convention economic lift. Think Time Warner Center with gaming and meetings instead of a mall. Granted, 160,000 square feet of flexible event space is small by convention standards, but add in a 5,500 seat theater and 6.3 million square feet overall, and there’s room to pull off a substantial get-together. Over Memorial Day weekend, Revel hosted Governor Christie, First Lady Michelle Obama (kids in tow), and Beyoncé (I-MAX cameras in tow), all in one night.

Meanwhile, the resort hotel floats above it all with its cavernous spaces subtly shifting from one mod mood to the next. Like flipping through shelter magazines, low-key luxe materials stream by visitors as they approach the check-in.

This is not the theme casino of old Atlantic City, said Floss Barber, who designed the resort’s presidential suite along the lines of an updated take on deco master Jean-Michel Frank. Barber remembers the days when everyone wanted gladiator-and-gilt Roman-inspired stage sets. She said she conducted hours of presentations with DeSanctis before he signed off on a newer look. “He was present, engaged, hip, and aware,” she said. And while several Atlantic City regulars may find the place disjointed, cold, or unfamiliar, DeSanctis seems to be taking a gamble that AC is on to a new life.

Triangle Trouble

In a closely watched competition to envision an AIDS Memorial at Triangle Park in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Brooklyn’s studio a+i took first place for their design, Infinite Forest, beating out more than 475 entries. The memorial is intended to replace a depressing garden and garage directly across the street from the former St. Vincent’s Hospital, where thousands of AIDS patients were cared for throughout the height of the epidemic in the 1980s. But while the competition captured the imagination of architects across the city, many Village residents feel the competition ignored their concerns.

The winners were announced just one week after City Planning approved plans for a community park on the 1,600-square-foot site to be built by Rudin Management and designed by M. Paul Friedberg and Partners. Triangle Park fulfills the developer’s open-space requirements in connection with their $800 million multiuse complex across Seventh Avenue on the site of the old hospital. But while the M. Paul Friedberg design included a memorial component, it was not a memorial. When approving the Rudin plan, Commissioner Amanda Burden of City Planning said she was “confident” the developer would find a way to integrate an AIDS memorial into the Triangle Park plan.

While the ULURP was getting underway, media-savvy Queer History Alliance (QHA) joined forces with Architizer.com and Architectural Record to sponsor a competition that would scrap the M. Paul Friedberg design in favor of a site-specific AIDS memorial.  The group assembled a star-studded jury that included Whoopi Goldberg alongside architect Michael Arad, to name but two. The competition was announced at a community board meeting last fall but community members complain that they were not involved with the competition that ultimately attracted a huge response from firms near and far, including three runners-up from Singapore, Ohio, and Manhattan.

The five-person team from the Brooklyn firm studio a+i envisioned three walls that would bind the park with mirrors on the interior and slate on the exterior. The mirrors would reflect a grove of white birch trees. Park entrances are slotted into the three corners of the triangle. The space between the mirror and slate walls acts as both light wells and entrances for a museum intended to go beneath the park. There are no markers with names or dates for the 100,000-plus New Yorkers who died of AIDS; instead, visitors are encouraged to write on the slate walls with chalk, “creating an ever-changing mural which is refreshed with every rain,” according to the architect’s submission text.

Studio a+i’s design includes the site’s full 16,000-square-foot footprint as well as a below-grade basement space that has not been officially part of the park. The M. Paul Freidberg plan used 15,000 square feet, leaving 1,000 square feet for the use of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center—which the community hoped would become a much smaller memorial. Rudin Management has not yet agreed to cede the 1,000 square feet or the below-grade space. After the vote, Rudin chief executive William Rudin said that original M. Paul Friedberg design incorporated “place holders” for a “commemorative element” and that the company would continue to work with the community. He would not comment on the below-grade space.

Christopher Tepper, a co-founder of QHA, said that the use of the below-grade space was included in the impact study, but that the M. Paul Friedberg plan approved by the commission only used the space for tree roots, and its use as a museum or learning center wasn’t studied.  In a statement after the competition winner was announced, Rudin noted that their design had already been approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Community Board 2, the borough president’s office, and the City Planning Commission. It goes before the city council in March.

With the ULURP process complete, residents were miffed by the walled-off design, particularly after months at the community board were spent debating the entrances, number of trees, water fountains, and a short stair needed on the south side of the park. Early on, a representative from QHA reached out to Marilyn Dorato of the Greenwich Village Block Association, but Durato found their assurances shallow. “They were basically deceiving us; the community really wants a park,” said Dorato.

Four out of the five architects from the studio a+i team came from Rafael Viñoly’s office. Co-founder Mateo Paiva said their experience there taught them about the give-and-take process. “I’m not sure what it’s going to become,” he said of the winning design. “What we were trying to do is to communicate a strong idea—and we only had one page. But for every project on a certain scale you have to deal with the community, and that’s what makes it interesting.”  

An oft-repeated concern at community board meetings was that a memorial should commemorate the 160 years of St. Vincent’s care that include survivors from the Titanic, as well as patients from the flu pandemic of the 1920s, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and the AIDS crisis. But most Villagers are reticent about attacking the plan out of concern for offending their neighbors while under the scrutiny of the media. “I’ve never seen a press push like this. It’s created a bit of antipathy,” said Dorato. “There’s a sense that they’re a group that should be sensitive to bullying, and now they’re doing it.”

Viva Vanna

The Architect's Newspaper

Amid the grand chateaux and stately villas of Chestnut Hill rests the unassuming Vanna Venturi House.  On an early spring afternoon, two visitors cautiously crept past melting mounds of snow to have a look. It’s a sight all too familiar to the current owner Agatha Hughes, whose parents purchased the house from Robert Venturi in 1973. Interlopers are as much a part of the landscape as the arc of crabapple trees bordering one side of the property.

Hughes’ father was a historian of modern technology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother was an editor and ceramicist. Together the couple wrote Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual. The family’s decorating taste leaned toward cozy academic clutter. And so it has remained. In the bedroom, her father’s box set of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities still sits on the bedside table, while in the living room an old oil portrait of a family ancestor stares down his nose at a Lebbeus Woods drawing and a three-panel color illustration by Rem Koolhaas. But the primary work of art remains the house itself, and careful maintenance is an ongoing mission. Hughes is currently on the hunt for the small metal clasps that fasten the drawstrings on the canvas shades. For every need, like replacing the large plate glass window at the center of the portico, she calls Venturi.

Having the architect’s advice has its benefits and its drawbacks. When Venturi told Hughes that the house was beginning to show its age and advised a new paint color, she had five large swatches painted onto the front. The architect picked a color and the painters got to work. With the paint purchased and the facade partly done, the architect sped up the driveway to say it was all wrong and he had another idea. Venturi had spent a considerable amount of time determining the color of a lentil, and the gray with a tinge of green took on a cooler hue.

Hughes says that the architect rarely looks at the house without having minor regrets about technical issues. Such perfectionism prompted her to invite Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown to enjoy the house with a bit more distance. It was five o’clock on a summer evening, and she set up a little café on the front drive and poured glasses of wine. Soon Venturi began to reminisce about the years he once lived there. “And after a while,” Hughes recalled, “he began to say ‘It’s all right, maybe it’s not so bad.’”

Road to Green

Architect's Newspaper

Via Verde, the affordable housing complex designed by Dattner Architects in partnership with Grimshaw, would fit with any of the sexy newcomers on Manhattan’s West Side Highway. Built atop a former rail yard in the Melrose section of the South Bronx, the triangular site sits directly across from some featureless low-income housing in uninspiring old-school red brick.

Jonathan Rose Companies and Phipps Houses developed Via Verde with Dattner and Grimshaw, the team that won the New York New Housing Legacy Competition, New York’s first juried competition for affordable and sustainable housing, in 2007.

The 151 rental units and 71 co-ops are geared toward middle to low-income families. The 290,000 square foot project is shooting for LEED Gold and is a pilot for the city’s Active Design Guidelines, meant to combat obesity by encouraging exercise and activity through design; there are staircases everywhere.

The complex slowly steps away from athletic fields at the south and up toward a twenty-story tower. From a four-story section, to an eight-story section, then ten, and twelve, with each successive floor providing generous rooftop space for programming.

Five live/work units face the street with street-side office entries, and some retail and grocery stores mixed in. Charcoal bricks face the first two stories, before being relieved by 25-foot-long prefabricated panels that front much of the building’s facade.

The prefab panels are divided into geometric color/material blocs that serve aesthetic and practical ends. Composite wood panels stained deep brown, maroon, and honey butt against aluminum rain screens with airspace between the outside facade panels and the wall sheathing and insulation behind. The pressure-equalized system, developed in Europe, allows moisture to “weep out” from the building, a feature more common in office buildings. The curtain wall panels include sunscreens, balconies, windows, and doors. They were shipped directly to the site, craned into place, and then snapped on.

Set midway into the building, a large archway guides residents into a central courtyard where a row of townhomes line the eastern edge of the site. Galvanized steel stairs invite residents to climb up, rather than ride the elevator—a theme repeated throughout.

Once inside the court, the rooftop setbacks get dramatic play. Residents can climb up to their apartment level via amphitheater seating that steps up to the top of the townhouses and a series of rooftop gardens designed by Lee Weintraub. There, a grove of pine trees—that can be harvested by the community at holidays—will give way to another level holding edible fruit trees. A bridge connecting the east and west wings of the complex guides visitors through a community roof garden. On the next level up there is a community gym, primarily programmed for exercise. The building continues to work its way up toward the tower, but the rest of the setbacks host an organized array of photovoltaic screens held in place, trellis-like, by galvanized steel frames.

At the top of the 20-story tower, there is a patio with a panoramic view of the Bronx and midtown Manhattan skyline. Across Melrose, the redbrick of old-school projects meets the contemporary orange of newer low-income housing. In the midst of it, all Via Verde stands apart: green striving for gold, and accessible on many levels.